Aman Amun

The units leds light up and a quiet fan starts.  I had read reviews of Psystar’s pre-built hackintosh before which said that they had loud fans. I had assumed that they would have changed their fans after all those reviews and I was right.  One point for me.

I have my monitor plugged in and it bursts to life with the Psystar logo followed by a pretty standard bootloader.  After the bootloader a bluish screen appears and beneath a silver Apple logo the “I’m loading circles” spin for 20 seconds or so and stop.  I just wait and stare at the screen.  I’m actually really exited at this point because I forked over good money for this and it’s really important that I have it by my show next week.

But nothing happens.

I seriously gave it way too much time.  Each minute was counted by another crossed appendage until I didn’t have any left.  I eventually resigned tot he sad truth.  It had frozen on its first boot.

Keep in mind that I bought this computer because its’ spec made my tiny white show-crashing machine look like a tiny white show-crashing beeper.  Its terabyte hard drive, its 10 usb ports, and its counter-strike nerd rated graphics card all convinced me that my days of instability were at an end.  I guess I didn’t realize that I was in for one last hump before an infinite dry spell. Eternal humplessness?

Needless to say, after that everything went wrong.  After a lot of struggle I succeeded in booting OS X and managed to check the configuration of the machine.  The processor upgrade which i paid for ($350) wasn’t there!  I decided that the freeze on the first boot and the issues on startup were just part of a bad out-of-the-box experience (no directions) and I expected to get the money back for the hardware upgrade which I had paid for but didn’t receive, and so I opened Safari.

First thing on my big list of software to download and install was Eclipse.  I’ve mentioned it on here before, its pretty much just a glorified text editor that I can use to write code for my projects.  I started the download and then my phone rang, I turned away from the computer and answered the call.  When the call was over I turned back to the computer and attempted to move the mouse.  I say attempted because the mouse didn’t move or wiggle or blink or do anything.  I attempted to tab over to a different window to test the keyboard and failed at that as well.  I attempted to stare down the download bar only to encounter the same kind of stagnancy.  It was frozen again.

I’m going to get Psystar to take their brick back and in return give me back my money. I’ve learned a valuable lesson through this whole experience which is thus:  with shortcuts come shortcuts.

And so, my future, my present:

This is my new Brain.  It has 2 processors, 2 graphics cards, and, when my audio interface is plugged in, 2 soundcards.  Things officially just got beefy.

[ edit: ]

I contacted Psystar to have the computer replaced and they offered to fix it and have it back to me by tomorrow.  I seriously doubt that it would work like that, but its irrelevant whether it would or not because since I had time constraints and they botched my order I was forced to buy another computer.  They then told me that I would have to pay a 25% restocking fee as I had agreed to in their terms of service.  They then sent me an RMA form which I filled out and sent to them only to get another email saying thus (and i paste):

“Please disregard the last email sent as the return form was generated incorrectly.  Please keep in mind that your computer is still covered under its 3 year warranty and can be sent back for repaired.”

So, not only did they not send me a computer with the specifications that I ordered, send me a computer that is pretty much incessantly frozen, waste a bunch of my time waiting for, messing with, and returning their computer, and screw up the return form, but they charged me $600 for the whole experience.  Moral of the story.  I’m a naive idiot for going against everyone else’s advice, don’t buy Psystar.

So I decided it was time for an upgrade.

To be frank, my last show (up in New York) was nothing short of a technical catastrophe.  I had 30 minutes to set up an entire live recording and sound processing setup, a projection interface, and a lighting rig, a task which took me more than 3 hours including calibration and testing for my first show in Athens.  I ended up having to abandon my projection interface and lighting because of certai

n issues relating to the venue’s projecters.  I successfully set everything up in time but didn’t have time to calibrate and test everything.  In short, this caused some instability which resulted in, among other issues, ableton live crashing.  Twice.

After the second one I was about ready to admit defeat until someone in the audience suggested I just play the rest of the set Acoustic.  I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me before.  Almost all the songs start out t

hat way and get most of their practice in that format.  In the end I developed a healthy appreciation for the fact that everything went wrong.  Its impossible that more could go wrong than that and everything still turned out alright.

So like any persistent soul who is unwilling to admit defeat in the face of self-inflicted adversity, I trekked on

and started drawing up plans for how to solve some of the inherent problems to the complexity of what I do.  Step 1, get a new brain.

Some might suggest it a stupid move to get a non-apple computer running OSX.  Others would suggest it was a stupid move to buy a Hackintosh rather build my own.  I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with either of you, but I definitely don’t have the time to build a rack mount Hackintosh that I can be sure will work, and I definitely don’t have the cash to buy the equivalent rack mount mac (which would set me back roughly $2000 more).  And so I threw down pretty much all the gold I mined at Frog Design this summer and bought the best and cheapest machine that runs OS X that I could.  My new brain.

I’m could spare you the bloody details, but I won’t.  I bet there are a couple people out there who might be curious about what my purchase experience was like and how the machine stands up to my standards.  So here we go:

1. It took roughly 2 weeks (15 days actually) from my order to when it arrived at my parents house.  I forgot that they had to build it custom for me so I called them sometime in the middle and they were friendly and told me it was in testing.

2. The packaging itself was alright, but the out of the box experience itself was terrible.  All they really provide is a document with five pages stapled together.  Its badly printed in black and white on basic printing paper and labeled  “Setting Up Your Open/OpenPro Computer.”  Considering that the machine I bought was their “Rackmount Open(7)” model, the attached pages with basic labeled pictures of their Open Computer were pretty much irrelevant.  The last page “Connecting Your Computer” is full of relevant information, but it hardly touches on the big questions which I had about where to start.  I assumed that OS X was already installed and so I booted the machine up.

More coming in another entry….